V(300): 40ish white man.seems regular. The table just started about 20 mins.
Hero(300): ABC style. Play only good hands.

Hand:

Preflop: V straddles to 6 on button. Hero raises to $16 on MP with KK. V calls.

Flop: 566r
Hero bets 30. V calls.
Turn: Td. complete diamond draw now.
Hero bets 40. V calls
River:Js.
I don't think River is going to help him, I check to induce bluff. He bets 40. Hero raises to 80.

Thoughts on my play?

So far I have about 130 live hours now. My hourly rate is -19. Is this horrible?

With button straddle your preflop raise should be bigger. Size depends on table but $20/$25 would be what I would start with. Flop bet is too big, $20/$25 is enough on a fairly dry board. Turn bet is a bit too small given the pot size at that point. Depending on villain, you may not want to bet the turn but mostly you should be betting.

River play just goes entirely off the rails. Checking river to call a bluff is OK occasionally but you should be betting more often then not. This is a bad board for trying to induce, the dry flop means it's unlikely villain was chasing and board makes it unlikely villain will bet worse for value. The $40 bet on river should make you suspicious, that is a small bet and obviously not intended to get you to fold. Pot odds are too good to fold, but there is no point in raising. The bluffs fold and there are not any worse value hands that can call a raise. In general, if you check to induce a bluff on the river there is no point in raising unless you have close to the absolute nuts.

Sizing is the biggest issues I see and the raise on the river.
Raise more pre-flop. Less on flop bet for sure.

if you successfully induced bluffs on river, what's the raise for?

Hand is fine river raise is ehh , I'm usually just calling a bet unless I have a read

Grunch:

Pre flop is too small in general. We want to be going $18 - $20 in general here.

Flop is a bit too big imo. $22 - $ 25 would be better. We don't want him to fold out weaker made hands, and there are almost no draws out there to protect against.
Also, given the smaller pre flop sizing, and the wide range that he can call with, we don't really want to get stacks in here by the river as we are almost always beat when we do.

We don't want to be bloating the pot OOP when we are not trying to play for stacks on a paired board.

River is fine if we plan to induce. Once you induce, you are essentially saying that you expect him to bet a wide range of weak hands, but yet you want to raise to get him to call with that same range? Does not compute.

Checking/callling is fine. Check/raising is not good imo.

If you are inducing a bluff by checking are you inducing a 2nd bluff by min check raising?

I hope you lose this pot hero

Thanks everyone. It really helps

-_-. I didn't think that deep.thanks

Raise more pre with straddle on. As played, with 100bb and that board run out, you should be looking to get the whole stack in by the river.

-19.an hour is not bad at all

Yeah, hand is alright until the river. $16 is small pf, but the table is new and no one else has entered the pot. I can see making that small of a raise if the table is playing tight and folding a lot to pf raises.

On the river, if you are checking to induce a bluff, then why check-raise now? Bluffs will fold (or reraise, forcing you to fold). Flushes will call, trips will call. What hands did you expect to call the check-raise that you can beat?

With a straddle on and a $300 stack, this gives us an opportunity to raise slightly larger than normal and get in 10% of our stack preflop such that we can stack off postflop on non-******ed boards. So I would raise to $30 preflop.

As played, our smaller raise has created an SPR upwards of 9ish. We just can't be stacking off with this SPR unless against a truly horrendous opponent. This SPR is also difficult to bet/fold 3 streets with because by the final street we're not going to have much left (we're going to be committed, unless all our bets are very small). So I think we're going to have to attempt getting a street to check thru.

Since we'd love a street to check thru, I'd start with checking the flop and see if that works. If we are going to bet, I'd bet small (no more than 1/2 PSB). I don't like the big bet at all unless we were planning on checking the turn, but this is hard to do OOP.

The turn is another place where we can consider checking (if we're betting the flop). Are we really going to get 3 streets of value from a worse hand, especially a hand like 99/88/77 when an overcard comes? Even with this small bet size (< 1/2 PSB), we've now build a $180 pot with just $214 left on the river.

If we think this guy can bet busted draws (such as a busted straight draw) then I'm fine with our check on the river to induce.

His bet is extremely small (a lol $40 into $180), so I can understand our temptation to get more money into the pot (i.e. if we think we can bet/fold against him, a lead of $80 would probably be a decent size). But typically bets on the river are fairly polarized in this spot; Villain's will typically happily check back their marginal hands (and these are the only hands that will call a raise), and only bet their monsters (i.e. 6x/etc, which will now shove) or their bluffs (which will never call a raise, although once and a blue moon they might do some random super bluff shove).

Overall, don't spend too much time fretting about your winrate. But do spend more time planning your hand (taking into account stack sizes, what betting on each street accomplishes with regards to this, etc.), and I get the feeling you're not doing that yet.

GcluelessNLnoobG

Thank you!! This is very helpful. I didn't think/plan that deep when I was in the hand.